1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a set of computers operating in a network and helping users which are geographically distant to resolve the practical problem of indecision in a lottery in an individual and participatory way. More broadly, the foundations of this invention can be applied also in various areas such as quantum physics, insurances (selection and prevention of risks), decision support systems or diagnostic support systems.
2. Description of the Prior Art
It is interesting to notice how the task consisting of marking the lottery table resp. a bingo card, which appears to be at the same time common place and trivial, often takes the style of a real brain teaser. This observation is a striking sign indicating that each participant concedes to this game in his subconsciousness a portion of determinism. The object of the present patent is the description of a novel general procedure which supports the forecasting of random phenomena as well as the description of its implementation in a lottery. It is discussed to introduce some determinism in areas which a priori are completely random. The application of this to lottery results in a system which provides a user at an individual level with the possibility to control and influence his chances in this game and also, as an extension, to participate therein together with other users in a collaborative resp. participatory way.
The scenario of an indecisive participant resp. player trying to define for himself the best subset of winning combinations is an example, which can be extrapolated to technical domains, where the random character of events renders forecasts difficult. By leaning on the observation of a large number of events, it is possible in certain cases (of which a lottery is just one) to characterize small subsets which comprise with a large probability the next events resp. elements which will extirpate in a random manner from the set of all the events resp. elements. This observation inspires a novel approach which the inventor has called “instable sets” and which adopts the notion of a characteristic function which is known notably in the theory of vague (i.e. Fuzzy) (sub-)sets, which has been formulated for the first time by Lotfi Zadeh in 1965 to account for defined sets in an imprecise manner [Ref. 1].
A basis for the theory of vague (i.e. Fuzzy) subsets of a set E is the definition of a characteristic function for every subset A, which associates to each element x of E not only one of the values 0 (to indicate that x does not belong to A) and 1 (to indicate that x belongs to A), but eventually any other value comprised in the interval of real numbers between 0 and 1, i.e. [0, 1]. The associated value expresses a degree of membership, wherein a value close to 1 indicates that x can be considered as very likely belonging to A.
It is a characteristic of the notion of a vague (i.e. Fuzzy) subset A of E, beyond all the imaginable variations in its application, that in the formulation A corresponds to a preconceived model which determines the nature of the characteristic function. For example, this is the case when one defines A to be a set of points, which define an ambiguous figure in a three-dimensional space E in a precise region of this space. A characteristic function of the Fuzzy set A may thus give the degree of membership of any point in (the set) E to (the subset) A. Suppose now that (the subset) A is defined by any exact restriction on (the set) E and that the characteristic function of the Fuzzy (subset) A is defined as the probability that an element, which has been selected at random from (the set) E, obeys the criteria defining (the subset) A. In order to construct such a subset A, a notion of instability is introduced as follows:Instx(A)=Card(A)/Fx(A/E),where Fx(A/E) is the frequency satisfying the criteria defining (the subset) A for the x last elements of E until the selection at random, Card(A) is the number of elements of A. (For the needs of the present invention, considerations are limited to cases of finite sets herein.)
According to the area of application and the way in which the restriction for (the subset) A is defined, one can substantially reduce the efforts necessary to constitute the set, to which the next event will belong with a large probability. By introducing a process of elaborating (such) instable sets, it may become possible to predict in a more deterministic way the next event in a sequence of random events. Similarly, in other technical fields, e.g. in quantum physics, the scientists may envisage a more deterministic description e.g. of the phenomenon of the radioactive decay of atoms as an alternative approach to the “absence of memory” of the atoms admitted in this field. Also, as another example, a different type of representation of atomic orbitals can be envisaged with this novel approach.
Aiming to apply these notions to the maximization of chances in a lottery game, one is interested in the subsets A of weak instability in the set of possible combinations in a lottery system. Such a technique is likely to upset the way in which millions of people in the world participate in a lottery. Indeed, thanks to its application, many people will have the possibility to experience another way to play in a lottery, which will not be governed completely by chance and randomness. Until the present day, there is not a single computer system distributed across a network of computers, that would offer to its users the possibility to generate optimized predictions of random events, in particular optimized combinations of lottery numbers, or to create a synergy and an interaction among them. The present invention shall fill in this void.